A former Parking Violations Bureau judge who used his inside knowledge to skirt $12,000 worth of parking tickets will now be driving with a suspended license – his law license, that is.

A state appeals court put the brakes on former Administrative Law Judge Glenn Caldwell’s legal career yesterday, slamming him with a three-year suspension and finding he “deliberately attempted to cheat the city out of money that it was rightfully owed,” the state Appellate Division found.

“Between June 1997 and May 1999, [Caldwell] amassed a total of 167 parking tickets and paid none of them,” the decision said.

“That respondent, a former ALJ [administrative law judge], would utilize his expired identification card and his knowledge of the inner workings of the PVB adjudicatory process for his own personal gain, is simply appalling.”

“Oh my goodness,” said Caldwell, 56, when The Post reached him and told him about the ruling. He declined to comment further.

The court-appointed referee who heard Caldwell’s case, Jay Topkis, said in his report that it was “a miserable tale, a story of a lawyer who tried trick after sleazy trick in his attempts to outsmart the law.”

Caldwell served as a judge for the city’s Finance Department from 1991 to 1995. When he stepped down, he turned the focus of his law practice to helping people challenge parking tickets – and used a slew of tricks to make sure he wouldn’t have to pay any tickets himself, court records show.

The first trick, court papers show, was when he signed up for vanity plates for his two cars, a Nissan Altima and Chevy Malibu. The plates weren’t the typical vanity plates – one was Y5OV26 and the other was 4GZZ50.

Caldwell testified that those combinations of letters and numbers were “likely to be mis-cited by officers,” and were chosen “to provide me with a technical defense to these tickets,” the referee’s report said.

The lawyer also would obscure the cars’ vehicle registration numbers, so ticketing officers couldn’t see they were vanity plates, which would lead to technical defects on the tickets – and the tickets being entered into a different computer program so they wouldn’t match Caldwell’s cars, court papers say.

Caldwell also kept his judicial identification, which he would put on his dashboard in hopes ticket agents would look the other way.